First Draft News

Getting it right from the source: A collection of articles & case studies offering best practice advice & guidance for handling eyewitness media. Imagine the following situation: you’re sitting at your computer or looking at your mobile phone when suddenly you come across a powerful first-person video on YouTube, or a visceral image on Twitter, depicting a breaking news event. You want to share it, but it’s coming from a source or a person you’ve never heard of before so you find yourself wondering… “is this real?” If you’re a journalist working in a newsroom today, it’s likely you’ve found yourself in this situation many times before if not many times a day. In those crucial moments in the aftermath of a breaking news event, like the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris or the earthquake in Nepal, eyewitness documentation can be essential to piecing together what happened. The revolution in user-generated news content presents a great opportunity to expand our view of the world, but it also raises entirely new challenges for the news industry to grapple with. How & where do you find these images? How can you verify that they are authentic & genuine? Do you have the right to use them? The First Draft Coalition is a group of thought leaders and pioneers in social media journalism who are coming together to help you answer these questions, through training and analysis of eyewitness media. Our founding members, from different organisations & projects, are each dedicated to raising awareness and improving standards around the use of content sourced from the social web. They are Bellingcat, Eyewitness Media Hub, Emergent, Meedan, Reported.ly, Storyful & Verification Junkie. Our aim is to open up the conversation around eyewitness media in news reporting with a strong focus on ethics, verification, copyright & protection, and we want to reach & hear from everyone in the journalism community, including students, lecturers, local reporters & international editors.

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